“Paradise Lost” - Paul Chefurka
Many
of us who have been paying attention to the state of the world over the
last half century have now begun to realize with growing horror that
the progressive deterioration we have been tracking shows no signs of
resolution In fact, to some of us it looks as though there is no way
to resolve this deepening crisis. The end of the track is in sight. The
planetary factory is in flames, and all the exit doors are barred.
Proposed
technical solutions are utterly inadequate to the scale of the problem.
Many ideas like geoengineering will simply make matters worse. There
is no political constituency for degrowth – none at all. There is
precious little political support for even putting a light foot on the
brake. This road to Hell has been paved with the very best of
intentions – giving our children a better life stands near the top of
the list – but here we are nonetheless. The climate is signalling that
our future may be a little warmer than we were expecting, once our
seven-billion-passenger train passes those gates.
Now
that the denouement is in sight, I’m setting aside the anger and
outrage, the blame and shame, to focus my attention instead on why this
outcome seems to have been utterly inevitable and unstoppable.
Why
has this happened? I don’t buy the traditional “broken morality” or
“flawed genetics” arguments. After all, our genetics seemed to be
perfectly appropriate for a million years, and the elements of morality
that some of us see as sub-optimal (the greed and shortsightedness) have
been with us to varying degrees since before the days of
Australopithecus. I don’t think it’s just a mistake on our part or a bug in the program – it appears to be a part of the program of life itself.
It looks to me as though much deeper forces have been at work
throughout human history, and have shaped this outcome.
The
main difficulty I have with all the technical, political, economic and social reform proposals I've seen is that they run counter to some very deep-seated aspects of human behavior and decision-making. Mainly, they assume that human intelligence and analytical ability control our behavior, and from what I've seen, that’s simply not true. In fact, it’s untrue to such an extent that I don’t even think it’s a “human” issue per se.
I
have come to think that most of our collective choices and actions are shaped by physical forces so deep that they can’t even be called
“genetic”. I haven’t written anything definitive about this yet, but
the conclusion I have come to in the last six months is that a physical principle called the "Maximum Entropy Production Principle”, which is closely related to the Second Law of Thermodynamics actually underlies the structure of life itself. Its operation has shaped the energy-seeking, replicative behavior of everything from bacteria to humans. All our intelligence does is make its operation more effective.
This principle is behind the appearance of life in the first place, has guided the development of genetic replication and natural selection, and has embedded itself in our behavior at the very deepest level. Like all
life, our mandate is simple: survive and reproduce so as to form a
metastable dissipative structure. All of the human behavior and history has been oriented towards executing this mandate as effectively as possible. This “survive and reproduce” program springs from a universal law of physics, much like gravity. As a result, it even precedes genetics as a driver of human behavior. And lest there be any lingering
doubt about the connection to our current predicament, the survival
imperative is what causes all living organisms to exhibit energy-seeking
behavior. Humans just do this better than any other organism in the history of the planet because of our intelligence.
In this context, the evolutionary fitness role of human intelligence is to
act as a limit-removal mechanism, to circumvent any obstacles in the way of making make our growth in terms of energy use and reproduction more effective. It’s why we are blind to the need for limits both as individuals (in general) and collectively as cultures. We acknowledge limits only when they are so close as to present an immediate existential threat, as they were and are in hunter-gatherer societies.
As a result, we tend to make hard changes only in response to a crisis,
not in advance of it. Basically, the goal of life is to live rather than die, and to do this it must grow rather than shrink. This imperative governs everything we think and do.
As
a result, I don’t think humanity, in general, will put any kind of
sustainability practices in place until long after they are actually
needed (i.e. after population and consumption rates have begun to
crash). I don’t think it is possible for a group as large as 7 billion
people to agree that such proactive measures are necessary. We are blind to the need for limits as a fish is to water for similar
reasons. After the crisis has incontrovertibly begun we’ll do all kinds
of things, but by then we will be hampered by the climate crisis and by
severe shortages of both resources and the technology needed to use
them.
I
have given up speculating on possible outcomes, because they are so inherently unpredictable, at least in detail. But what I’m discovering about the way life works at a deep level makes me continually less optimistic. I now think near-term human extinction (say within the next hundred years) has a significantly non-zero probability.
Our cybernetic civilization is approaching a "Kardashev Type 0/1 boundary"
and I don’t think it's possible for us to make the jump to Type 1.
Like most other people, Kardashev misunderstood the underlying drivers of human behavior, assuming them to be a combination of ingenuity and free will. We indeed have ingenuity, but only in the direction of growth (and damn the entropic consequences). We can’t manage preemptive de-growth or even the application of the Precautionary Principle,
because as a collective organism humanity doesn't actually have free will (despite what it feels like to us individual humans). Instead, we exhibit emergent behavior that is entirely oriented towards growth.
I see no purpose in wasting further physical, financial or emotional energy on trying to avoid the inevitable. Given our situation and what I think is its root cause, I generally tell people who see the unfolding crisis and want to make changes in their lives simply to follow their hearts and their personal values. I'm not exactly advising them to “Eat, drink and be merry”, though. You might think of it more as, “Eat, drink and be mindful.”
Paul Chefurka
August,2013
Ottawa,Canada
Comments:
We
struggle to explain why the conventional economic doctrine battles the
realities of existential economic science; the first hypothesizes an
infinite
positive sum-game for human activity, while the latter goes begging to
find a wider audience for its voice - that asserts a finite negative
sum-game, dictated by
the physical constraints and the laws of exponential mathematics. These
two beliefs are
deeply conflicting with one another because the first chooses to ignore
the governing
rules of the universe, whereas the other proposes integration with
science,
physics and mathematics, in order to set a better path for human
activity.
So in
our search for explanations we look to other writers, scholars, thinkers and
activists for insights into why our collective actions and theories act in
defiance of realities by endorsing infinite growth doctrines that are not only
impossible to continue any longer, but they also push our species along an accelerated
path destined for premature extinction.
As
Paul
Chefurka sets out in “Paradise Lost” maybe there is nothing to be done
or anything else that
can be said. Our internal wiring is so connected to the natural forces
of the universe that it causes us to pursue and use more energy to serve our
primary purposes
of survival and procreation. Call it an inborn energy-seeking behavior.
We are then just an integral natural part of the second law of
thermodynamics serving to further
and accelerate the causes of entropy in the whole universe. That being
the case, conventional economic doctrines sadly wins the battle, as it
is clearly aligned with entropic
forces that invisibly shapes the destiny of humanity, the universe and
eternity.
Hence
in our last analysis, it as certain as it gets that we cannot defeat
eternity, but that in itself should not dissuade us from seeking to
optimize our entropic relationship with the universe in pursuit of a
longer path. Too many things could happen along the way!
Toronto, ON
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